


on a bluer ocean

by evewithanapple



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Gen, Nile Freeman & Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani Friendship, Nile Freeman & Nicky | Nicolò di Genova Friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-02
Updated: 2021-02-02
Packaged: 2021-03-14 04:48:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29165226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evewithanapple/pseuds/evewithanapple
Summary: Two bodies of water.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 18
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 6





	on a bluer ocean

**Author's Note:**

  * For [quae_bookmarks](https://archiveofourown.org/users/quae_bookmarks/gifts).



On balance, Nile thinks she’s probably more well-travelled than most people her age. Certainly she’s gotten around more than her high school classmates, the majority of whom have never left Chicago. Boot camp took her to South Carolina, a place that had always made her vaguely uneasy - too many Confederate flags - and then she’d shipped out, first to Iraq and then to Afghanistan. She’d been surprised, stepping off the plane for the first time, how normal it all felt: just another run-down airport. But for the signs in Dari and Pashto on the airport walls, she could be back in O'Hare. It was only when she stepped outside and immediately got a faceful of sand that it finally sunk in how far she was from home. 

For all of her travels, though, she’s been firmly landlocked. She knows how to swim, obviously - the Marines took care of that - but a few childhood trips to the beach are the extent of her experience with fresh water. So when she plunges into the Aegean Sea just off the coast of Chios, the first thing that strikes her is that she didn’t expect it to be this cold. 

“You okay?” Joe shouts at her over the roar of the waves. She’s too out of breath to do more than nod, and they’re both in too much of a rush to linger. They’re in Greece to help refugees trying to cross into Italy, and more specifically to try and avoid as many drownings as possible among those trying to make the journey in rubber dinghies. Which is why Nile, Joe, and Nicky are all towing life rafts in their wake as they make their way towards the lifeboat bobbing in the water a few feet away, threatening to capsize in the choppy waves with at least fourty people on board.

(Andy is not on this run with them. Both because, being mortal, the risk of losing her to the waves is too great and also because she has a . . . _thing_ about water. Nile doesn’t blame her. She also wouldn’t be in the ocean if she didn’t have to be, and she can’t even die.)

Once they make it to the lifeboat, it’s just a manner of convincing the people on board to load the children and elderly onto the rafts, making the trip back to shore with them, and then returning until everyone is safely off the water. Of course it’s not as easy as all that - the people on board the lifeboat are, understandably, panicking, and several resist handing their children over to the total strangers who’ve just bobbed up next to their boat. It takes several successful trips before some of them agree to board at all. One little girl jumps for the raft, misses, and nearly goes under before Nicky manages to grab her and hoist her back up. By the time everyone’s been safely transported to land and loaded onto the trucks that will take them to the border, Nile is thoroughly soaked, more than a little battered, and freezing. 

“You’ll get used to it,” Joe says as he drapes a safety blanket around her shoulder. Nile wriggles out of her sodden shirt and pants before tugging the blanket tight around her neck. It still won’t do her much good before she gets rid of her wet bra and underwear, but she’s not that comfortable with stripping in front of the guys yet. 

“We are going somewhere warm next,” Nicky says. He’s also bundled up in a blanket, with just the top of his head poking out; with his hair standing up in spikes, he looks like a little kid fresh out of the pool. “Somewhere where the sea does not want to kill us.”

Joe pauses toweling his hair off long enough to laugh at him. “The man who prides himself on hailing from a port city complains of the sea?”

“I have the right to complain precisely _because_ I know how dreadful the Mediterranean is,” Nicky retorts. Nile bites her lip to keep from laughing at the indignant look on his face. “Do you know why I entered the priesthood? It was so I would never be called to set foot on that - _laghetto puzzolente e puzzolente_.”

“I wouldn’t mind hitting the beach,” Nile says. Wet underwear aside, she actually is starting to feel warmer. “But, like. Not here.” The spot they’re sitting in now - on the back of their pickup truck, parked on a little jutting spit of rock - has a clear view of the sea they just climbed out of, which is a dark, forbidding shade of cobalt. The wind is kicking up overhead, tossing waves towards them; Nile can taste the incoming storm at the back of her throat.

“That,” Joe says, “can be arranged.”

* * *

He’s as good as his word, albeit not right away; their current mission keeps them in place for another three weeks, until the summer draws to a close and the number of boats trying to cross slows to a trickle. Nile tries to argue for staying longer, but Andy points out - fairly - that if they wait for there to be no boats coming, they’ll be here for years. They job was to alleviate as much of the risk as they could during peak crossing season, and they’ve done that; now it’s time to move on.

By this point, Nile’s forgotten their beach conversation entirely. So when Andy announces that their next stop is Australia, she takes it in stride - probably there’s some human smugglers or domestic terrorists or some such that they need to take care of. She never really thought of Australia as a hotspot for that sort of thing, but Copley’s the one who gives them their marching orders, and she figures the ex-CIA guy knows more about it than she does. For the same reason, she doesn’t ask any questions then they land, then pile into a Land Rover and drive for several days across the desert. They toss sleeping bags on the ground at night, and sleep staring up at the sky, and Nicky warns her to shake her boots out in the morning before putting them on - this is spider country. Nile lets the boot spiders go free after she shakes them out, but when a nasty-looking one the size of her hand (a huntsman spider, Andy helpfully informs her) tries to crawl into her sleeping bag, she feels no compunction whatsoever about beating it to death with her backpack.

Their ultimate destination is a tiny house surrounded on all sides by trees - no people for miles, as far as Nile can tell. No life at all, apart from the birds and the bugs. It’s then that she finally starts to get suspicious about the reason for their visit, and when she says as much, Andy only raises her eyebrows. “Who says we’re here on a job?”

“Copley suggested it might be a good idea to lay low for a few weeks,” says Nicky, who is always willing to answer her questions (unlike _some people_.) “Apparently we drew some unwanted attention in Greece, so he would prefer that we make ourselves scarce.” 

If there was any place in the world to lay low, Nile thinks, it must be here. No light or noise pollution, no nosy neighbours - no signs of civilization at all. It’s the kind of place that would have bored Nile out of her skin in her old life, but in this one it’s a welcome oasis in the middle of all the chaos. The house has a wrap-around porch, and though there’s no screen to keep the bugs out, she does find some netting in the basement and drapes it over the edge of the rooftop gutter to make a sort of tent. It’s a one-bedroom house, so the options are to rotate the room between the four of them (well, three of them; Joe and Nicky obviously don’t sleep alone), sleep on the floor of the main room, or just take the porch. Nile opts for the third option. She’s more or less made her peace with the spiders at this point.

It’s not until their third day at the house, when Andy’s taken off with the Land Rover - not running any errands, she says, she just feels like driving - that Joe explains to her that this used to be Andy’s house. Like, not a safe house, but an actual _home_ , where she lived, for several decades. Knowing that makes the lived-in atmosphere of the place make more sense - it feels like a summer home, not a military base. The kind of place where she’d expect to find well-loved mugs in the cupboards and board games piled up in the TV cabinet. (She checked; there’s no TV cabinet or board games to be seen.)

It’s also on the third day that she discovers the lagoon. The ground out behind the house slopes sharply downward, so much so that she has to take it at a run to keep from falling over, so she didn’t bother investigating it at all for the first few days. But she’s bored, and the house is starting to feel too small for four people, so she hops the railing on the back porch and stumble-jogs down the hill. She’s not really expecting to find anything except more trees, which is why she’s so shocked when the ground suddenly levels out and she sees a broad blue expanse of water spread out in front of her. This isn’t the stormy blue of the Mediterranean, but a serene turquoise, so smooth and so still that it almost looks like a sheet of stained glass. Nile picks up a pebble next to her foot and lobs it towards the water; it lands with a soft splash, sending tiny ripples towards the shoreline. A few of the roll up over her toes, soaking through her sneakers.

“Beautiful, no?”

Nile jumps, but it’s only Nicky come up behind her. “I’m going to bell you,” she says. “Like a cat.” She’d do it, too, if she thought it would actually help. But he’d probably just manage to creep around silently regardless.

Nicky just shrugs, leaning against one of the trees. “It is a miracle that it’s been kept hidden for so long. The people who once lived here knew of it, but settlers never did, so far as we can tell.”

“We _are_ settlers,” Nile points out.

“We are visitors,” Nicky says lightly. “What is the saying? Take nothing but pictures, leave nothing but footprints?” He waves a hand. “Of course there is the house, but it was built in the nineteenth century. We’ve touched nothing else since.” He pauses. “Except the water. It’s warm, you know. Very suitable for swimming in.” 

Nile squints at the water. “This is Australia. I assume it’s full of poison fish or something.” 

Nicky gives her a look which says silently, _would it matter?_ And she realizes, oh right. No it wouldn’t. Not that she really wants to be taken out by a stonefish, but it’s not like there are any long-term consequences to worry about. 

Still, she doesn’t come back to the lagoon until after the sun has set and the others are asleep. She didn’t say anything about it to Andy when she gets back, or to Joe. He must guess anyway - well, or Nicky told him, which is more likely - because he makes a comment over dinner about having promised her a beach vacation and it finally clicks that they did this on purpose. She doesn’t say anything back, just nudges his leg gently with her foot under the table in silent thanks.

After dark, she slips on a baggy t-shirt and climbs over the back railing again. Once she gets to the shore of the lagoon, she pulls the shirt off, tosses it aside, and wades in in just her bra and underwear. She kind of likes the idea of skinny-dipping, but she’s not quite brave enough to do it here. Immortality or not, there’s almost certainly fish in this water that bite, and there are places on her body she would very much prefer not to have bitten.

She expects the water to be chilly at first, and the ticklish warmth of it shocks her as she wades in. It feels like stepping into a slightly cooled-off bath, or a swimming pool on a warm afternoon. Tiny reddish leaves in the water - she assumes it’s algae - brushes against her legs as she goes, and the mud on the floor of the lagoon squishes between her toes. Once she’s in up to her waist, she takes a deep breath and dives forward. 

Several kicks and breast strokes later, she finds herself just about in the middle of the lagoon, where she can no longer brush the bottom with her toes. She twirls around in the water until she’s floating on her back, and starfishes out, staring up at the night sky. Here, as in the desert, the sky is crystal clear, and she can count every star. She might try it, too, if she wasn’t afraid of putting herself to sleep.

Floating there, with the algae still brushing against her sides and her hair floating around her head like a crown of seaweed, she can’t help but compare it to her dip in the Mediterranean. She hadn’t cursed the sea then, but only because she’d been to preoccupied to think of it. Waterlogged and freezing, she’d thought she would never be warm again. Watching the people they were helping scream as their boat nearly capsized, she’d thought there was nothing good to be found in the water. She wondered if any of those people would ever enjoy swimming like she was now, of if they’d stay on shore for the rest of their lives. She wouldn’t blame them if they did. 

For herself, she knows she’ll have to go back in the ocean again someday - maybe someday soon. This tropical water vacation can’t last forever. But she can rest a little in the meantime, in this tiny oasis that’s only meant for her and her family. Knowing she _has_ a family, the kind that will bring her to places like this just to make her happy. This brief span of time on the surface is more than enough to fortify her before she has to dive down again.


End file.
